Friday, March 09, 2012

Digression: a vitruvian theme

The second book of Vitruvius’ treatise on architecture
begins by considering the origin of human building. That origin is, it turns
out, connected with the origin of human speech, the origin of politics, and the
discovery of fire – which form a sort of originary matrix:

“Mankind originally brought forth like the beasts of the
field, in woods, dens, and groves, passed their lives in a savage manner,
eating the simple food which nature afforded. A tempest, on a certain
occasion, having exceedingly agitated the trees in a particular spot, the
friction between some of the branches caused them to take fire; this so alarmed
those in the neighbourhood of the accident, that they betook themselves to
flight. Returning to the spot after the tempest had subsided, and finding the
warmth which had thus been created extremely comfortable, they added fuel to
the fire excited, in order to preserve the heat, and then went forth to invite
others, by signs and gestures, to come and witness the discovery. In the
concourse that thus took place, they testified their different opinions and
expressions by different inflexions of the voice. From daily association words
succeeded to these indefinite modes of speech; and these becoming by degrees
the signs of certain objects, they began to join them together, and
conversation became general.

Thus the discovery of
fire gave rise to the first assembly of mankind, to their first deliberations,
and to their union in a state of society. For association with each other they
were more fitted by nature than other animals, from their erect posture, which
also gave them the advantage of continually viewing the stars and firmament, no
less than from their being able to grasp and lift an object, and turn it about
with their hands and fingers. In the assembly, therefore, which thus brought
them first together, they were led to the consideration of sheltering
themselves from the seasons, some by making arbours with the boughs of trees,
some by excavating caves in the mountains, and others in imitation of the nests
and habitations of swallows, by making dwellings of twigs interwoven and
covered with mud or clay. From observation of and improvement on each others'
expedients for sheltering themselves, they soon began to provide a better
species of huts.”

As Erwin Panofsky pointed out in a famous and beautiful essay
on a series of paintings by Piero Cosimo that were inspired by Vitruvius’ text,
the story Vitruvius tells is related to other stories about Vulcan, the God of
fire, and Aeolus, the God of the wind, that crop up in many classical texts.
Vitruvius introduces no gods – Panofsky attributes this to his Lucretian
naturalism. It is the wind that is in action here, not the god of the wind, and
the fire that starts in the woods is not started by a god, but by the friction
of the branches. The story of the discovery of fire, along Vitruvian lines, has
had a long intellectual life, serving both as a model and a limit case of the
logic of that vexed pair, discovery and invention. In turn, these terms seem to
overlap the discourses of history and social science, in as much as these have
to do with social collectives – aggregates – and individuals. The first
sentence of Vitruvius’ second paragraph begins like this: “ergo cum propter
ignis inventionem conventus initio apud homines et concilium et convictus esset
natus…” The first impulse of we moderns is to lead these words back into the
great dual categories under which modernity has proceded, nature and culture.
However, it turns out that we cannot shoehorn these concepts into those
categories without covertly applying the logic of the supplement so expertly
defused by Derrida in On Grammatology–
for what nature is borrows on what culture is to be, and vice versa: it is a
conman’s checking account.

Which is not to say that it can’t be drawn on – on the
contrary. After showing how the forest fire was seen as the predecessor and
model for the first fires of man in the classical and Hellenistic epochs and
from thence was lifted into the allegorical key to a series of three paintings
about the origin of civilization by Piero di Cosimo, Panofsky writes,
beautifully: “The ruling principle of this
aboriginal state, namely, the unfamiliarity of man-kind with the use of fire,
is conspicuously emphasized by what might be termed the " leitmotiv"
of the whole series: the forest fire, which can be seen ravaging the woods and
frightening away the animals in all three panels ;2 in two of them it even appears
repeatedly. The persistent recurrence of this motif cannot be accounted for by
mere pictorial fancy. It is, most evidently, an iconographical attribute rather
than a whimsical " concetto,"fo r it is identical with the famous
forest fire which had haunted the imaginations of Lucretius, Diodorus Siculus,
Pliny, Vitruvius, and Boccaccio. It appeared regularly in all the illustrations
of Vitruvius, and in the Renais-sance it was as characteristic of
representations of the Stone Age as the tower of images of St. Barbara.”

I would like to argue that
scorch marks from Vitruvius’ fire haunt that fabulous myth, Western man, and
his sidekick, homo oeconomicus, long after Cosimo. The semantic architecture of
Vitruvius’ story of the origin of architecture can be traced not only in the
way the history of technology is told, but in the way the social sciences have
explained themselves – not just explained themselves in the internal dialogues
of the disciplines, but explained themselves in collaboration with the ongoing
mission of capitalist civilizations, which automatically divided the primitive
and the civilized according to a Vitruvian measure – that of technology. That
fire is both a natural and an artificial product blurs its definitional import
– but the language that springs up from those huddle about the fire seems to
take from the fire the decisive force that will, in one form or another, become
the dividing line that justifies a global exercise of power. Writing, or, after
the printing press, the book, becomes the civilizing technology par excellence,
thrusting those ‘without writing’ into not only a different category, but even
a different time zone, as though this lack had cut them off fromthe zone of simultaneity which traverses and
determines the way those who do write make sense of writing.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.